New Service Illustrates the Gorgeous Spiderweb of Retweets

Where Does My Tweet Go reveals three levels of retweets shortly after @wired posts a tweet. Photo: Screen grab

Sometimes your most obscure tweet gets picked up by an equally obscure person. Now a new service lets you see exactly how a message disseminates through the tangles of the interwebs, leaving no retweeter anonymous anymore.

The online application Where Does My Tweet Go?, created by information architect Benoît Vidal and the team at MFG Labs in France, uses a visual algorithm to illustrate how your messages spread between your followers and strangers alike. Rather than looking at your Twitter feed and seeing an obscure number of retweets for a post, these graphs let you see how your messages travel and who moves them along in the Twitterverse. Vidal says that while they were inspired by how information gets out so quickly over the Internet, they were also inspired by their dissatisfaction with other applications that tracked your activity and gave you content suggestions, but did so in an invisible way.

“Services, such as Zite and Flipboard, already analyze your Twitter timeline to recommend you tweets, but you don’t know how this works and you are left wondering whether you have missed something and eventually you return to Twitter,” Vidal says. “We’re fascinated by the information transmission on the Internet, and we didn’t think any current interfaces showed the power of that velocity. Most of them only look like timelines or feeds, and we wanted people to see and feel the power of a message being transmitted by not just the number of retweets, but by observing the structure and understanding the travel of a tweet through a network.”

The key lies in their SpreadRank algorithm and the graphs it creates. SpreadRank graphs look like webs made of white rings connected by colorful lines. In the center of each graph is a white dot for the original tweet. Each line coming out of the center of the graph shows a follower who retweeted. The outer white rings represent degrees of retweeters, with the first ring showing all the Twitter user’s followers that retweeted the message. After that it becomes like a degree of separation game, with the larger rings showing retweets from people other than the original followers. There’s also small green lines coming up off the graph that show how many followers each Twitter user has.

President Obama’s message of triumph, the central point on the graph, spread deep into the twittersphere. Photo: Screen grab

The graph is the visual explanation of the tweet’s SpreadRank number, which could be any value between 1 and 1000. According to Vidal, one of the best examples of how SpreadRank valuates a tweet is to compare two powerhouse Twitter users—Justin Bieber and President Obama.

Biebz, the record holder for most Twitter followers with just over 38 million, is actually not the most influential. Beliebers retweet the singer’s messages all the time, but as his graphs show, once his followers retweet him, the message tends to stop there. President Obama, on the other hand, may lag in followers with a mere 30 million, but his tweets are shared well beyond his first circle of followers and over longer periods of time, giving his messages bigger impact overall and higher SpreadRank values.

Satisfying your curiosity to see who retweeted you isn’t a new craving, and there are a number of services that help you do so. Twitter itself has the most basic tool in a ticker showing the number of retweets for a specific tweet. WDMTG is still in beta, so the features are limited, but its real-time data visualization of your retweets number make it stand out from others. Right now you can only work with your profile and your tweets, and with some trend filters; you can’t search for specific users or tweets. But Vial has ideas to expand the service’s capabilities so both individual Twitter users and groups can use it to understand how and to whom their messages spread, and what messages they should be reading.

“Who should I send a tweet to for it to get maximum exposure?” Vidal asks. “What form does my tweet take in terms of influence? Which tweets should I read, based on who is retweeting me? WDMTG is all about answering questions and seeing those answers clearly.”